The heritage of William Morris

By Terry Liddle

Born in 1834 into a wealthy middle class family, William Morris
was destined for the Anglican Church. His mother had visions of his
becoming a bishop. However, after education at Marlborough and
Oxford, Morris abandoned religion in favour of art.

William Morris was a polymath who excelled at everything he
turned to -- from stained glass to textile design, from poetry to
translations of the ancient Icelandic sagas and novels that
prefigure the work of Tolkien.

In 1861 he set up the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and
Company, which offered paintings, decoration, metalwork, stained
glass, jewellery, sculpture and furniture of all kinds. An example
of his stained glass can still be seen in Wimbledon Labour
Club.

He married Jane Burden and they went to live in the Red House,
which still exists, in what is now Bexleyheath. There they had two
daughters, May and Jenny, who followed their father into socialism.
But his marriage was not a happy one.

The reform agitation of the 1860s and the Republicanism of the
1870s inspired by the re-establishment of a French Republic seem to
have passed Morris by. He entered politics as an opponent of a
repeat of the Crimean War, becoming treasurer of the Eastern
Question Association. He made his first political speech then and
wrote his "Appeal to the Working Men of England" in which he saw
the question of war as a struggle between capitalists and the
people.

Morris canvassed for Charles Dilke, the erstwhile Republican MP,
and became treasurer of the National Liberal League, a pressure
group of radical working men.

He became disillusioned with Gladstone's Liberal government and
its failure to carry out reform at home and with its continuation
of imperialism abroad. Aged nearly 50, he crossed what he called
"the river of fire" and joined the Social Democratic Federation
(SDF), Britain's first Marxist organisation, led by Henry
Hyndman.

Having read Henry George's Progress and Poverty and J S Mill,
Morris set about reading Robert Owen and William Cobbett and the
first volume of Capital in French. He said he enjoyed the
historical parts but had difficulties with the pure economics. He
wrote for the SDF paper Justice and undertook numerous speaking
engagements up and down the country, both in the open air and in
numerous clubs and halls. He spoke to striking coal miners.

He defined socialism as "...a condition of society in which
there should be neither rich nor poor, neither master nor master's
man; neither idle nor overworked; neither brain-sick brain workers
nor heart-sick hand workers; a world in which all men would be
living in equality of condition and would manage their affairs
unwastefully, and with the full consciousness that harm to one
would mean harm to all -- the realisation at last of the word
commonwealth."

But all was not well in the SDF, which Hyndman tended to treat
as his private property. Matters came to a head late in 1884 at a
stormy meeting of the SDF, which Hyndman had packed with loyal
supporters. Morris and others walked out to form the Socialist
League (SL).

It published, first monthly and then weekly, a paper, the
Commonweal. This was largely the work of Morris, who subsidised it
by as much as £500 a year. With a circulation of two
to three thousand, it was the best socialist paper of its day.

The Socialist League manifesto stated: "...the machinery,
factories, workshops, stores...all means of production and
distribution of wealth, must be declared and treated as the common
property of all." It continued: "...the waste incurred by the
pursuit of profit will be at an end, the amount of labour necessary
for every individual to perform in order to carry on the essential
work of the world will be reduced to something like two or three
hours daily..."

A circular "To Socialists" proclaimed that in the present a
socialist body had no function but to "...educate the people in the
principles of socialism..."

The SL was an odd mix. There were the European exiles like
Scheu, who had been involved in the anarchist group around Most,
and Lessner; there were the intellectuals like E Belfort Bax, an
intimate of Engels; Eleanor, the youngest of Marx's surviving
children, and her lover Edward Aveling; a scientist and former
leading secularist. And, mainly in the East End of London, there
was a group of self-educated working men who were
anti-parliamentarian and had a healthy disrespect for
authority.

Among them were Joseph Lane, a carter involved in Radical
politics from his teens; Franz Kitz, a dyer for whom Morris found
work in his factory at Merton; and Sam Mainwaring, an engineer.
They had organised the Labour Emancipation League, which held
meetings at Mile End and other East End locations.

Morris got on well with anarchist intellectuals like Peter
Kropotkin. The similarity between Morris's ideas and those of
Kropotkin, in such works as the Conquest of Bread and Fields,
Factories and Workshops, is obvious. However, Morris would fall out
with the East Enders.

These men's lives were blighted by often chronic poverty and
insecurity, and under those conditions they moved towards
anarchism. They espoused individual deeds of resistance leading to
mass acts of resistance, which would lead to revolution. Morris on
the other hand wanted a mass movement of conscious socialists,
people who would understand socialism and be prepared to act for
it.

A draft constitution written by Aveling and Eleanor Marx
committing the League to contesting elections was defeated at the
conference of 1885. An attempt to reintroduce parliamentarianism by
Bax's Croydon branch prompted Lane to write his "Anti-Statist
Communist Manifesto" as a minority report.

The gradual departure of the parliamentarians strengthened the
hand of the anarchists in the League, leaving Morris increasing
isolated. Morris called himself a Communist, feeling that the word
required no further qualification. He disagreed with the
anarchists, but also thought electoral efforts premature.

At the League's 1887 conference there were four motions from the
Bloomsbury branch of Aveling and Eleanor Marx. Three were concerned
with strengthening the power of the branch in the League. The
fourth, known as "Bloomsbury Two", again proposed contesting
elections. This was amended by Morris to make it an
anti-parliamentary motion and was passed by a comfortable margin.
The other motions were heavily defeated. Finally, amidst
acrimonious bickering, Bloomsbury declared its autonomy.

There was now an anarchist majority on the League Council. At
the end of 1888 Morris was writing to Bruce Glasier, a leading
League member in Scotland, that Hammersmith branch was coming into
conflict with the rest of the League because it kept up the idea of
"...making of genuine convinced socialists without references to
passing exigencies of tactics..."

In 1889 a discussion took place on anarchism in Commonweal.
Morris wrote: "I am not pleading for any form of arbitrary or
unreasonable authority. But for a public conscience as a rule of
action: and by all means let us have the least possible exercise of
authority."

On April 6 1890 Morris wrote to Glasier: "...members in London
mostly consider themselves anarchists but don't know anything about
socialism and go ranting revolution in the streets..."

By July he was complaining to David Nicoll about an article in
Commonweal, Nicoll haven taken over as editor, luridly describing
the Leeds gas-strike riots. "It goes too far or at any rate further
than I can follow you", he wrote. There followed a dispute over an
article on revolutionary warfare by Nicoll. At a meeting at the Kay
Street Radical club, where there had been calls for revenge for
police attacks on demonstrations in Trafalgar Square, he stated:
"The only real revenge we could possibly have was by our own
efforts bringing ourselves to happiness."

Morris now wrote his last article for Commonweal in which he
denounced riots by men who do not understand socialism. Hammersmith
branch withdrew from the League, which thereafter went into
decline.

The paths of Morris and the anarchists were to cross again in
1892. The police had arrested Charles Mowbray, a tailor, for a
particularly violent article by Nicoll in the Commonweal on the
Walsall case in which he appeared to advocate assassination of the
judge and police inspector involved. Mowbray was now publisher of
the newspaper. Mowbray's wife had just died from consumption
compounded by poverty. Morris stood £500 surety for
Mowbray so that he might attend his wife's funeral, which became a
political demonstration. Nicoll received 18 months imprisonment, in
the course of which he started to become unhinged, hearing voices
in his cell. He began to accuse his colleagues of being police
spies.

Morris gave evidence in the trial of Tom Cantwell, an old League
member who had been accused of soliciting the murder of the royal
family. He wrote in support of the Walsall Anarchists who had been
framed for alleged bomb making.

Hammersmith Socialist Society carried on alone. Its politics can
be judged from its "Statement of Principles", which Morris wrote.
"It should be our special aim to make Socialists by putting before
people, and especially the working classes, the elementary truths
of socialism... before any definite socialist action can be
attempted, it must be backed up by a great body of intelligent
opinion -- the opinion of a great mass of people who are already
socialists..."

The HSS became a model of non-sectarian socialism. Socialists of
all types from Shaw to Kropotkin spoke at its Sunday lectures.

Morris was on the platform with Engels and Aveling on the May
Day demonstration in 1891. Morris now made his peace with the SDF,
speaking on its platforms and supporting George Lansbury, future
leader of the Labour Party, in an election at Walworth. When the
ILP was formed at Bradford in 1893, Engels and Aveling and many
former SL members joined it. Morris did not. It was not
sufficiently socialist for him.

Early in 1896 Morris gave his last lecture on "One Socialist
Party". He died in October of that year. Among many moving tributes
was one from Robert Blatchford in the Clarion: "...he was our best
man and he is dead..."

Socialists of all types, anarchists, SDF, and League veterans
joined together in Holborn Town Hall to say farewell to their
fallen comrade.

Fifty years later, at the height of the Depression, cherished
copies of his Dream of John Ball and News From Nowhere were still
to be found in the homes of impoverished miners.

News from Nowhere was written in part as a reply to the utopian
novel Looking Backward by an American, Edward Bellamy, which Morris
had reviewed in Commonweal. Bellamy advocated a form of state
socialism, which he called nationalism, in which workers would be
conscripted into labour brigades, an idea advocated by Trotsky in
Russia in the early 1920s.

Nowhere is a place of communistic freedom where all are equal,
beautiful and healthy. Money, prisons, formal education and central
government have been abolished. Parliament has been made useful as
a dung store. The pollution-belching factories are gone. The
environment has been cleaned up -- salmon have returned to the
Thames. Commodity production and the dull grind of alienated labour
for wages are no more. Work is no longer useless toil, but the
joyful creation of things that are both useful and functional. The
false antithesis between work and leisure is a thing of the
past.

People no longer bear the burden of armoured characters. They
are free, joyful, spontaneous, sensual. They call each other
neighbour; they touch, they love without fear. As one of Morris's
characters puts it: "The spirit of the new days, of our days, has
to be delight in the life of the world."

Morris makes it plain that this new and beautiful society has
been arrived at by a process of revolutionary struggle.

Much has been written about Morris. Many have claimed him as
their own. The church would have made a saint of him, Andrew
Collins, a writer of occult fiction, thinks he was a Druid!

Morris belongs neither to Marxists, Anarchists or Greens. He
belongs to all of toiling humanity, for his is a message of hope
for their freedom.

The best biography remains that by E P Thompson, William Morris,
Romantic to Revolutionary (Merlin Press, London, 1977). News from
Nowhere is available as a Penguin paperback. There is a useful
selection of his writings, William Morris On History (Sheffield
Academic Press, 1996). Much of his political journalism, in which
is included his debate with the anarchists, has been republished by
Thoemmes Press in Bristol, who have also republished Bruce
Glasier's 1921 work, William Morris and the Early Days of the
Socialist Movement. John Quail's The Slow Burning Fuse (Paladin,
London, 1978) is an excellent history of anarchism in this
period.

In his Dream of John Ball, a novel set during the Peasants'
Revolt of 1381, Morris wrote: "I pondered how men fight and lose
the battle and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite
of their defeat and when it comes turns out not to be what they
meant, and other men fight for what they meant under another
name."

In a wounded world made foul and ugly by capitalism, where
socialism at the hands of Stalinism has been turned from a
philosophy of liberation into an excuse for tyranny, we have again
to take up that fight. And in our fight we can only be inspired by
the vision and the example of William Morris.

This is the text of a talk given to London Anarchist Forum
on 18 October 2003. Reproduced with permission from
Workers Liberty.